Commenter Tom Lord at Nick Carr's blog gets to the point with this criticism of the author, beneath a post on cloud computing: "The problem with people like you, Nick, is that you don't understand software."

Carr can speak for himself (and does, in the comment thread), but I think the inadvertent argument here is compelling: most people don't understand software, certainly not in any depth. That includes most business users. They don't want or need to understand it, they just need it to work -- preferably anytime, anywhere, on any device.

That's what the cloud is supposed to promise.

The discussion of cloud critiques by Richard Stallman and Larry Ellison (both linked by Carr) is worth reading. The hype around this stuff is deafening. The lock-in risks are real (and something we've discussed here previously).

But utility computing is happening nonetheless -- including this move by Amazon offer Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.